Great article and thanks for the idea of the "energy slaves" working for people in the developed world!
The embedded energy description also makes it easier to get across the idea that higher quality products are actually a way to save money. If people would use credits to buy better products that last longer it would actually improve the world!
Unfortunately, quite some people are brainwashed into believing that changing their whole wardrobe latest every two years, and remodelling their houses every four years is an absolute necessity...
The excavator comparison really drives home just how invisble our energy consumption has become. When you break down that $2.50 gallon of gasoline into 14 days of continous human labor, it makes our casual attitude toward energy almost absurd. The section on disposable economy hits hard, especially the point about embedded energy wastd when we throw out repairable products. Your calculation showing that Americans use 100 energy slaves while much of the developing world operates on less than 10 is a stark reminder of both our privilege and the challenge ahead. The political dimension you mention at the end feels critical, since we have the technical solutions but lack the collective will to deploy them at scale.
I think that this is very understandable for everyday people as soon as you start doing things like growing food, managing a garden, etc, without fossil fuels.
My partner and I have a 5 acre homestead. Geese graze our grass and we use human power to move the fencing. We grow about 1000 lbs of food in about 1/2 acre of cultivation - entirely done in a closed loop system where we make our own compost, save our seeds, and sheet mulch the beds by hand, weeding. This is tremendous effort. We only grow about 20% of calories that we need. We also both work full time jobs, so we don't have all day to grow food.
The other thing that is useful to this discussion is to practice things like natural building--the amount of time it takes to take materials directly from nature in a sustainable way, prepare them, and use them (I'm talking Timber Framing, Cob and Strawbale construction). It is enormous amounts of work and I've been part of community builds. We create our own oven and it was several months of construction, working on it 1-2x a week for a few hours.
I am glad to have these experiences because it makes me very cognizant of fossil fuel use.
In degrowth economies many more people will be available to the community to grow food, making it somewhat easier. But yes, it's going to be hard work. There is no alternative as far as I can see.
... and this is the way to write about incomprehensibly large or small numbers: "Thus, 100 joules per second is the same as lifting 100 apples (about 20 lb) from the floor to a table every second. As I said, that’s hard physical labor." And the bicycle rider toasts a piece of bread video is the way to illustrate those numbers! Terrific post!
I read a book some years ago titled The Energy of Slaves, it really got me to thinking about how the ease with which we draw water and access food enables us to waste it so profligately. Were we to expend our own energy in our daily lives we’d be much more considered in our choices.
This is an excellent discussion. I've long felt that it's been a mistake to cast fossil fuels as unequivocally bad, which is contrary to most people's daily experience. I've used the same example of how little gasoline it takes to move people over a mile to illustrate why gasoline has been so valuable for us. One point to consider is that the half cup of gasoline can only do this with adequate infrastructure - well-built and -maintained roads, modern, efficient vehicles, fuel production and delivery systems, and the largely unseen (but critically important) set of standards and rules that allow it all to work. All of which take energy. While it's crucial that we transition away from fossil fuels, we can take advantage of a lot of the infrastructure that we've developed (and the energy embedded in that infrastructure) over the past 150 years to make it easier.
"I've long felt that it's been a mistake to cast fossil fuels as unequivocally bad, which is contrary to most people's daily experience."
Well, if fossil fuels were unequivocally bad, we wouldn't have burned enough to change the climate. All "free"-market transactions socialize some cost between buyer and seller. Two parties both enjoy the full private benefit (utility or profit) at the agreed-upon price, which excludes as much transaction cost, or "diseconomy" (e.g. marginal climate impact) as they can get away with between them. In this way, absent collective intervention, climate change is externalized by the global market. That's the "free" part.
The cost of climate change, in money and tragedy (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1), is instead paid for by involuntary third parties, independent of their private contributions to the problem or their resources to adapt. I, for one, can't call US$143 billion/yr (converting deaths to dollars) "free".
Those third-party payers are our energy servants. Even to me, that hardly seems fair. I can imagine how involuntary supporters of my energy-intensive lifestyle might feel, especially given the intrinsic inequalities of the global economy. Capping global warming is thus a collective action, i.e. political, problem: who gets how much benefit, who pays how much cost?
For US consumers, collective action means voting to reduce the price advantage fossil fuels enjoy by socializing climate change. Fortuitously, alternatives are only marginally higher priced already. The market barriers to decarbonizing our national economy must be reduced, whether by direct carbon pricing or subsidies for alternative energy adoption. It can be done incrementally, as long as our emissions decline quickly (for politically-determined values of 'quickly') as a result.
"Just because the costs and the benefits are more or less going to be a wash, [Taylor's fellow Libertarian, Jonathan Adler] said, that doesn’t mean that the losers in climate change are just going to have to suck it up so Exxon and Koch Industries can make a good chunk of money."
I think it's strawman-ish to suggest a lot of people cast fossil fuels as →unequivocally← bad, just that it was very bad that the people who profited from it did not have to pay the price of damage from extraction (from aquifer poisoning to mountaintop removal), the wars in the Middle East, health effects from combustion products, and the political suppression alternative energy technologies.
High Andy and Andrew, of course fossil fuels aren't bad. They have been a 'gift' enabling 8 billion plus humans to escape the malthusian trap. However, as we know, burning them is now limiting our existence. There is at present no transition away from them because all economies around the world are based on growth. Any development of renewable power is just energy addition. The only way to address the issue is for a multilateral degrowth economy. People will have jobs based on quality of life and care not on expanding markets for things. The growing of local community based organic plant based foods without fossil fuels will occupy the time of many. People do not need to move about and must stop doing so. Any carbon budget could be spent of developing countries infrastructure but then they too must cease to grow.
Amazing write-up! This really changes my perspective of how much we take our comfortable lifestyle for granted. It’s mind boggling how this concept is extrapolated to sustainability and lack of equitable wealth distribution. Thankyou so much introducing this concept to me!
Terrific article. Thank you. I'm wondering if there are any studies calculating the embedded energy in a vegan diet as opposed to a diet with meat, dairy and processed foods. Anyone, please share if you know of any such studies.
Great story to tell. Reminded me of Homer-Dixon's story of the Roman Empire and the energy it ran on, all estimated as units of barley. In his book The Upside of Down. He estimated we lived off 20 slaves in our modern lives.
Since you asked, “Embedded energy” as a term has pretty much fallen out of use, with “embodied energy” being the more common term. I would make the case that if you are looking at this in terms of climate, then you should be talking about embodied carbon rather than embodied energy, since if the embodied energy is from clean renewables, who cares? “Embodied carbon” is an awful term because it is not embodied, it is in the atmosphere already. That’s why I was part of a group that coined “upfront carbon emissions” to identify all the emissions that go into making everything from a hamburger to a house. I wrote a book about it, “the story of upfront carbon” that I would be happy to share with you.
thanks for your suggestion of "embedded" vs. "embodied"; I'll add a note to my chapter.
as far as energy vs. carbon goes, I do think talking about energy is useful b/c it shows us how much we rely on energy for our modern life. that said, 'embodied C' is also an important concept.
the terminology has confused everyone forever, from my book:
In his 2008 book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air David Mackay includes a chapter titled “Stuff,” where he discusses the energy required for raw materials (R), production (P), use (U), and disposal (D). Writing about the energy costs of phases R and P, he notes that “These energy costs are sometimes called the ‘embodied’ or ‘embedded’ energy of the stuff—slightly confusing names, since usually that energy is neither literally embodied nor embedded in the stuff.”
As you mention energy coming from "clean renewables" I must ask, what do you mean by that term?
I was under the impression that neither wind or sun can be considered really "clean renewables" as they both heavily rely on fossile energy for their manufacturing.
Currently, our energy system runs mainly on fossil fuels. And since you need energy to produce basically anything, we use a lot of fossil fuels in producing renewable energy. However, the need here is energy, not fossil fuels. As we clean up the energy system, fossil fuels will no longer be needed and renewables will be clean.
A good point about embedded carbon in renewables. And, it's a huge assumption that we'll be able to produce them in the future without fossil fuels--right now, we have no prototypes that show that this can be done, right?
I'm really confused about why people think we need fossil fuels to build renewables. What you need is **energy**, which renewables can provide. If there's some analysis that demonstrates the need for fossil fuels, I'd love to see it.
The solar panels built with some % fossil energy will go on to produce decades of clean energy.
The term to note is the "carbon payback period" for various energy sources (Iowa wind turbine, solar panel used in Germany vs. solar panel in Texas, modern Chinese nuclear power plant), the point at which it has provided as much clean energy as any carbon-based energy (or concrete chemical emissions) needed to create it. As China adds greater and greater percentage of non-fossil energy supply, its PV manufacturing gets cleaner, and the carbon payback period gets shorter.
Similarly, I bought my first EV in 2015. Since I charge at home from the local grid, every year I've driven since then has had a smaller and smaller fossil component (though a lot of EV drivers get everything from their rooftop solar instead of the grid).
"EVs still preferrably need roads and infrastructure requiring oil in different forms."
----
Yes, and I know that personal cars are a waste in themselves. 🙄 Still, at every stoplight and in stop-n-go traffic and while people are parked for a "quick trip inside," I notice all of those combustion engines running whether or not the vehicle is in motion.
The concrete for roads is probably the dominant source of greenhouse gases. Asphalt as a material (containing bitumen, but producing no combustion products) is surprisingly highly recycled, apparently pushing 99%.
One study from a couple of years backs noted that more people were buying EV scooters not just to replace combustion scooters, →but instead of cars←. Woo-hoo! Young people may save us yet.
Anders, I understand and sympathize with your sense of urgency. I first learned about global warming in 1988. I was newly employed as an IT contractor at Goddard Space Flight Center, when Hansen appeared in Congress to announce global warming was underway. Imagine the frustration of watching GMST climb 0.9 degrees in 37 years, while people with obviously selfish motives successfully obstructed collective action to decarbonize the US economy. One thing I'm confident of, is that there will be no climate-realist coup d'état in the USA.
Global warming is the biggest tragedy of the commons in human history. It's happening because humans have always socialized every private cost we could get away with on the the global marketplace. Eight billion or more people will only reduce their aggregate fossil-carbon emissions when carbon-neutral energy is priced lower "at the pump" than FFs. Neither Prof. Dessler, you, me, nor any individual TCB commenter, has any power to change that aggregate behavior directly. It can only be done collectively, at the national level. Politics thus rears its ugly head!
Obviously, decarbonization isn't going to happen all at once. Yeah, it's gonna get hotter in the near term. Yet more homes, livehoods, and lives, and even other species, will be lost to sea level rise and worsening extreme weather. How many more, depends on how fast the global economy decarbonizes. Humanity can only hope to cap the trend of GMST as low as possible, as soon as possible.
Currently, the US rides for free on the collective decarbonization costs of other nations (https://www.science.org/content/article/global-carbon-emissions-will-soon-flatten-or-decline). All we can do as individual Americans is join mass protests, and vote for a national climate-change policy: either decarbonize incrementally as quickly as politically feasible; or face unabated warming into the future, as our nation grows increasingly isolated and our climate-change casualties grow.
Once GMST stabilizes, we'll still be inflicting all our other impacts on the biosphere, but at least the climate won't be changing so fast! Sadly, we'll never have the option of voting for a fully sustainable world: only for enough time to forestall mass human die off, before our population starts to decline without it. Yeah, it's a bleak choice, but AFAICT in my 8th decade, it's reality. At least it will only be mine for another 25 years or so.
Tragedies of the commons arise because ever since trade emerged in our cultural evolution, every market transaction externalizes as much "environmental" (i.e. socialized) cost as the buyer and seller can get away with. That depends on what the society that is host to the market will tolerate. Therefore, subjective judgements like "clean" are always relative with respect to one social value or another.
As you point out, wind and solar energy sources aren't wholly without environmental costs, but are much cleaner than fossil fuels as regards lethal and destructive anthropogenic climate change, which is the greatest tragedy of the commons in history.
But the complaint that "both heavily rely on fossile energy for their manufacturing" is a silly decarbonization-obstructionist tactic that ignores the time dimension. As Prof. Dessler points out, renewable energy can build new renewable energy, until all new energy is renewable, and fossil-fueled sources are replaced with renewable ones. And the quicker we build out the carbon-neutral economy, the sooner emissions will fall to zero. Meanwhile, every decrement in emissions, or even in their rate of growth, slows the rate of warming below what it would otherwise be, along with the accumulation of social cost.
But barring sudden unforeseen global catastrophe, literally no one expects decarbonization to be complete for at least a decade. I submit that you are JAQing off here.
And my point is that fossil energy will have to stop today. Now.
Considering how large part of our way of life still is made possible by fossil energy (80-90%), replacing said energy with ”renewables” will certainly take more time than a decade. Several decades at least.
And that is time we simply don’t have at our disposal.
So instead of coming off as passive aggressive you can perhaps please explain how you came up with replacing fossil fuels in ”a decade”?
Would be great for me and anyone who wants to see some facts instead of hunches that there are ways to go forward to a decarbonized way of life for all of us.
"And my point is that fossil energy will have to stop today. Now."
Or else what, exactly? How soon? How will it affect me, personally? Please be specific. Be sure to include the randomness introduced by 8 billion or more economic agents, each independent of my wishes or yours, in your confidence limits. So far, you've shown no superior knowledge of human behavior. I, for one, will never believe you're a prophet.
"please explain how you came up with replacing fossil fuels in ”a decade”?"
I probably shouldn't, because you appear to be a committed doomer who will never be dissuaded: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a position he wasn't reasoned into" (J. Swift). I'll do you the honor of assuming you're not merely a poor reader, and your misquote was deliberate.
But for the lurkers: I didn't say "replacing fossil fuels in a decade". What I said was "literally no one expects decarbonization to be complete for *at least* a decade." (emphasis hopefully superfluous). IOW, dishonest rhetorical tactics expose Kollapstankar's obstructionist intent.
Again: Kollapstankar blatantly ignores the time dimension, and the uncertainties it introduces, especially those 8 billion random agents loose in the global marketplace, more or less motivated to intervene collectively. I, OTOH, need only project, within multiple sources of uncertainty, the curve of global heat content during my remaining "natural" (gotta love Medicare) life!
A lot can happen in 25 years. Only that long ago, I feared (ask me why) there were no alternatives to open-ended global warming, given the independent agency of (then) 6.1 billion other people. But yesterday, despite another 2 billion people living, a headline appeared on Science.org: "Global greenhouse emissions will soon flatten or decline—a historic moment driven by China’s surge in renewable energy" (https://www.science.org/content/article/global-carbon-emissions-will-soon-flatten-or-decline). I judge I can reasonably anticipate seeing the slope of the Keeling curve begin to flatten, and maybe even decline if emissions fall below the rate of natural CO2 drawdown in that time. YMMV!
Yes, people are already dying sooner than they would without anthropogenic climate change, and the attributable death toll will surely rise before the trend of GMST is capped. How much, how fast, is as yet undetermined! I'm not dead yet, nor are you AFAICT, Kollastankar. Go peddle your nihilism somewhere else, please.
This is a fascinating article. As an industry economist (public transit) I found the energy premise elegant. You provide a basis for analyzing social benefits and costs across energy sources. Mitigating or reversing the negative impacts of single-use products can also be expressed as energy.
Thanks Andrew for sharing my work on “billion dollar disasters” and why that tabulation cannot be used for research that means anything, which is of course why I don’t use that dataset in my work to say anything about the real world. There are better data out there.
Here is a direct link to my critique of the “billion dollar disasters”:
Great article and thanks for the idea of the "energy slaves" working for people in the developed world!
The embedded energy description also makes it easier to get across the idea that higher quality products are actually a way to save money. If people would use credits to buy better products that last longer it would actually improve the world!
Unfortunately, quite some people are brainwashed into believing that changing their whole wardrobe latest every two years, and remodelling their houses every four years is an absolute necessity...
The excavator comparison really drives home just how invisble our energy consumption has become. When you break down that $2.50 gallon of gasoline into 14 days of continous human labor, it makes our casual attitude toward energy almost absurd. The section on disposable economy hits hard, especially the point about embedded energy wastd when we throw out repairable products. Your calculation showing that Americans use 100 energy slaves while much of the developing world operates on less than 10 is a stark reminder of both our privilege and the challenge ahead. The political dimension you mention at the end feels critical, since we have the technical solutions but lack the collective will to deploy them at scale.
I think that this is very understandable for everyday people as soon as you start doing things like growing food, managing a garden, etc, without fossil fuels.
My partner and I have a 5 acre homestead. Geese graze our grass and we use human power to move the fencing. We grow about 1000 lbs of food in about 1/2 acre of cultivation - entirely done in a closed loop system where we make our own compost, save our seeds, and sheet mulch the beds by hand, weeding. This is tremendous effort. We only grow about 20% of calories that we need. We also both work full time jobs, so we don't have all day to grow food.
The other thing that is useful to this discussion is to practice things like natural building--the amount of time it takes to take materials directly from nature in a sustainable way, prepare them, and use them (I'm talking Timber Framing, Cob and Strawbale construction). It is enormous amounts of work and I've been part of community builds. We create our own oven and it was several months of construction, working on it 1-2x a week for a few hours.
I am glad to have these experiences because it makes me very cognizant of fossil fuel use.
In degrowth economies many more people will be available to the community to grow food, making it somewhat easier. But yes, it's going to be hard work. There is no alternative as far as I can see.
... and this is the way to write about incomprehensibly large or small numbers: "Thus, 100 joules per second is the same as lifting 100 apples (about 20 lb) from the floor to a table every second. As I said, that’s hard physical labor." And the bicycle rider toasts a piece of bread video is the way to illustrate those numbers! Terrific post!
Great article!
I read a book some years ago titled The Energy of Slaves, it really got me to thinking about how the ease with which we draw water and access food enables us to waste it so profligately. Were we to expend our own energy in our daily lives we’d be much more considered in our choices.
This is an excellent discussion. I've long felt that it's been a mistake to cast fossil fuels as unequivocally bad, which is contrary to most people's daily experience. I've used the same example of how little gasoline it takes to move people over a mile to illustrate why gasoline has been so valuable for us. One point to consider is that the half cup of gasoline can only do this with adequate infrastructure - well-built and -maintained roads, modern, efficient vehicles, fuel production and delivery systems, and the largely unseen (but critically important) set of standards and rules that allow it all to work. All of which take energy. While it's crucial that we transition away from fossil fuels, we can take advantage of a lot of the infrastructure that we've developed (and the energy embedded in that infrastructure) over the past 150 years to make it easier.
"I've long felt that it's been a mistake to cast fossil fuels as unequivocally bad, which is contrary to most people's daily experience."
Well, if fossil fuels were unequivocally bad, we wouldn't have burned enough to change the climate. All "free"-market transactions socialize some cost between buyer and seller. Two parties both enjoy the full private benefit (utility or profit) at the agreed-upon price, which excludes as much transaction cost, or "diseconomy" (e.g. marginal climate impact) as they can get away with between them. In this way, absent collective intervention, climate change is externalized by the global market. That's the "free" part.
The cost of climate change, in money and tragedy (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1), is instead paid for by involuntary third parties, independent of their private contributions to the problem or their resources to adapt. I, for one, can't call US$143 billion/yr (converting deaths to dollars) "free".
Those third-party payers are our energy servants. Even to me, that hardly seems fair. I can imagine how involuntary supporters of my energy-intensive lifestyle might feel, especially given the intrinsic inequalities of the global economy. Capping global warming is thus a collective action, i.e. political, problem: who gets how much benefit, who pays how much cost?
For US consumers, collective action means voting to reduce the price advantage fossil fuels enjoy by socializing climate change. Fortuitously, alternatives are only marginally higher priced already. The market barriers to decarbonizing our national economy must be reduced, whether by direct carbon pricing or subsidies for alternative energy adoption. It can be done incrementally, as long as our emissions decline quickly (for politically-determined values of 'quickly') as a result.
IOW, we must vote to take the profit away from fossil carbon producers and investors, by encouraging it to migrate to carbon-neutral energy instead. That seems fair enough to me. Once again, *former* mercenary Libertarian disinformer and Cato Institute VP Jerry Taylor (https://theintercept.com/2017/04/28/how-a-professional-climate-change-denier-discovered-the-lies-and-decided-to-fight-for-science/):
"Just because the costs and the benefits are more or less going to be a wash, [Taylor's fellow Libertarian, Jonathan Adler] said, that doesn’t mean that the losers in climate change are just going to have to suck it up so Exxon and Koch Industries can make a good chunk of money."
I think it's strawman-ish to suggest a lot of people cast fossil fuels as →unequivocally← bad, just that it was very bad that the people who profited from it did not have to pay the price of damage from extraction (from aquifer poisoning to mountaintop removal), the wars in the Middle East, health effects from combustion products, and the political suppression alternative energy technologies.
High Andy and Andrew, of course fossil fuels aren't bad. They have been a 'gift' enabling 8 billion plus humans to escape the malthusian trap. However, as we know, burning them is now limiting our existence. There is at present no transition away from them because all economies around the world are based on growth. Any development of renewable power is just energy addition. The only way to address the issue is for a multilateral degrowth economy. People will have jobs based on quality of life and care not on expanding markets for things. The growing of local community based organic plant based foods without fossil fuels will occupy the time of many. People do not need to move about and must stop doing so. Any carbon budget could be spent of developing countries infrastructure but then they too must cease to grow.
Fantastic article. Thank you for thinking of the future. And the video is astounding. Robert’s physiology is mind-blowing!
Amazing write-up! This really changes my perspective of how much we take our comfortable lifestyle for granted. It’s mind boggling how this concept is extrapolated to sustainability and lack of equitable wealth distribution. Thankyou so much introducing this concept to me!
Terrific article. Thank you. I'm wondering if there are any studies calculating the embedded energy in a vegan diet as opposed to a diet with meat, dairy and processed foods. Anyone, please share if you know of any such studies.
Great story to tell. Reminded me of Homer-Dixon's story of the Roman Empire and the energy it ran on, all estimated as units of barley. In his book The Upside of Down. He estimated we lived off 20 slaves in our modern lives.
Diet for a small planet, a book about eating referenced this way back in the 70s.
For a good mental image of energy slaves: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/#page-1
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/st-matthew-island/
This is a similarly powerful comic
By the same artist
This is great, thanks!
This is a brilliant piece of work that I regularly introduce to people
Since you asked, “Embedded energy” as a term has pretty much fallen out of use, with “embodied energy” being the more common term. I would make the case that if you are looking at this in terms of climate, then you should be talking about embodied carbon rather than embodied energy, since if the embodied energy is from clean renewables, who cares? “Embodied carbon” is an awful term because it is not embodied, it is in the atmosphere already. That’s why I was part of a group that coined “upfront carbon emissions” to identify all the emissions that go into making everything from a hamburger to a house. I wrote a book about it, “the story of upfront carbon” that I would be happy to share with you.
thanks for your suggestion of "embedded" vs. "embodied"; I'll add a note to my chapter.
as far as energy vs. carbon goes, I do think talking about energy is useful b/c it shows us how much we rely on energy for our modern life. that said, 'embodied C' is also an important concept.
Your point about energy is certainly valid, you should have a look at Florian Urban and Barnabas Calder's recent book Form follows Fuel which makes the same point https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781032637174/form-follows-fuel-florian-urban-barnabas-calder
the terminology has confused everyone forever, from my book:
In his 2008 book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air David Mackay includes a chapter titled “Stuff,” where he discusses the energy required for raw materials (R), production (P), use (U), and disposal (D). Writing about the energy costs of phases R and P, he notes that “These energy costs are sometimes called the ‘embodied’ or ‘embedded’ energy of the stuff—slightly confusing names, since usually that energy is neither literally embodied nor embedded in the stuff.”
As you mention energy coming from "clean renewables" I must ask, what do you mean by that term?
I was under the impression that neither wind or sun can be considered really "clean renewables" as they both heavily rely on fossile energy for their manufacturing.
Currently, our energy system runs mainly on fossil fuels. And since you need energy to produce basically anything, we use a lot of fossil fuels in producing renewable energy. However, the need here is energy, not fossil fuels. As we clean up the energy system, fossil fuels will no longer be needed and renewables will be clean.
A good point about embedded carbon in renewables. And, it's a huge assumption that we'll be able to produce them in the future without fossil fuels--right now, we have no prototypes that show that this can be done, right?
I'm really confused about why people think we need fossil fuels to build renewables. What you need is **energy**, which renewables can provide. If there's some analysis that demonstrates the need for fossil fuels, I'd love to see it.
The solar panels built with some % fossil energy will go on to produce decades of clean energy.
The term to note is the "carbon payback period" for various energy sources (Iowa wind turbine, solar panel used in Germany vs. solar panel in Texas, modern Chinese nuclear power plant), the point at which it has provided as much clean energy as any carbon-based energy (or concrete chemical emissions) needed to create it. As China adds greater and greater percentage of non-fossil energy supply, its PV manufacturing gets cleaner, and the carbon payback period gets shorter.
Similarly, I bought my first EV in 2015. Since I charge at home from the local grid, every year I've driven since then has had a smaller and smaller fossil component (though a lot of EV drivers get everything from their rooftop solar instead of the grid).
What I have noted is that few have considered the enormous size of, and time required for, the change needed from fossil energy and material.
And time is what we do not have when it comes to halting emissions.
As a sidenote, EVs still preferrably need roads and infrastructure requiring oil in different forms.
"EVs still preferrably need roads and infrastructure requiring oil in different forms."
----
Yes, and I know that personal cars are a waste in themselves. 🙄 Still, at every stoplight and in stop-n-go traffic and while people are parked for a "quick trip inside," I notice all of those combustion engines running whether or not the vehicle is in motion.
The concrete for roads is probably the dominant source of greenhouse gases. Asphalt as a material (containing bitumen, but producing no combustion products) is surprisingly highly recycled, apparently pushing 99%.
One study from a couple of years backs noted that more people were buying EV scooters not just to replace combustion scooters, →but instead of cars←. Woo-hoo! Young people may save us yet.
Anders, I understand and sympathize with your sense of urgency. I first learned about global warming in 1988. I was newly employed as an IT contractor at Goddard Space Flight Center, when Hansen appeared in Congress to announce global warming was underway. Imagine the frustration of watching GMST climb 0.9 degrees in 37 years, while people with obviously selfish motives successfully obstructed collective action to decarbonize the US economy. One thing I'm confident of, is that there will be no climate-realist coup d'état in the USA.
Global warming is the biggest tragedy of the commons in human history. It's happening because humans have always socialized every private cost we could get away with on the the global marketplace. Eight billion or more people will only reduce their aggregate fossil-carbon emissions when carbon-neutral energy is priced lower "at the pump" than FFs. Neither Prof. Dessler, you, me, nor any individual TCB commenter, has any power to change that aggregate behavior directly. It can only be done collectively, at the national level. Politics thus rears its ugly head!
Obviously, decarbonization isn't going to happen all at once. Yeah, it's gonna get hotter in the near term. Yet more homes, livehoods, and lives, and even other species, will be lost to sea level rise and worsening extreme weather. How many more, depends on how fast the global economy decarbonizes. Humanity can only hope to cap the trend of GMST as low as possible, as soon as possible.
Currently, the US rides for free on the collective decarbonization costs of other nations (https://www.science.org/content/article/global-carbon-emissions-will-soon-flatten-or-decline). All we can do as individual Americans is join mass protests, and vote for a national climate-change policy: either decarbonize incrementally as quickly as politically feasible; or face unabated warming into the future, as our nation grows increasingly isolated and our climate-change casualties grow.
Once GMST stabilizes, we'll still be inflicting all our other impacts on the biosphere, but at least the climate won't be changing so fast! Sadly, we'll never have the option of voting for a fully sustainable world: only for enough time to forestall mass human die off, before our population starts to decline without it. Yeah, it's a bleak choice, but AFAICT in my 8th decade, it's reality. At least it will only be mine for another 25 years or so.
Tragedies of the commons arise because ever since trade emerged in our cultural evolution, every market transaction externalizes as much "environmental" (i.e. socialized) cost as the buyer and seller can get away with. That depends on what the society that is host to the market will tolerate. Therefore, subjective judgements like "clean" are always relative with respect to one social value or another.
As you point out, wind and solar energy sources aren't wholly without environmental costs, but are much cleaner than fossil fuels as regards lethal and destructive anthropogenic climate change, which is the greatest tragedy of the commons in history.
But the complaint that "both heavily rely on fossile energy for their manufacturing" is a silly decarbonization-obstructionist tactic that ignores the time dimension. As Prof. Dessler points out, renewable energy can build new renewable energy, until all new energy is renewable, and fossil-fueled sources are replaced with renewable ones. And the quicker we build out the carbon-neutral economy, the sooner emissions will fall to zero. Meanwhile, every decrement in emissions, or even in their rate of growth, slows the rate of warming below what it would otherwise be, along with the accumulation of social cost.
But barring sudden unforeseen global catastrophe, literally no one expects decarbonization to be complete for at least a decade. I submit that you are JAQing off here.
Thanks.
And my point is that fossil energy will have to stop today. Now.
Considering how large part of our way of life still is made possible by fossil energy (80-90%), replacing said energy with ”renewables” will certainly take more time than a decade. Several decades at least.
And that is time we simply don’t have at our disposal.
Believing anything else is pure hopium.
Well, you doomers can subsist without hope if you must. I just have to live another 25 years at most ;^).
So instead of coming off as passive aggressive you can perhaps please explain how you came up with replacing fossil fuels in ”a decade”?
Would be great for me and anyone who wants to see some facts instead of hunches that there are ways to go forward to a decarbonized way of life for all of us.
Just words doesn’t do it for most.
"And my point is that fossil energy will have to stop today. Now."
Or else what, exactly? How soon? How will it affect me, personally? Please be specific. Be sure to include the randomness introduced by 8 billion or more economic agents, each independent of my wishes or yours, in your confidence limits. So far, you've shown no superior knowledge of human behavior. I, for one, will never believe you're a prophet.
"please explain how you came up with replacing fossil fuels in ”a decade”?"
I probably shouldn't, because you appear to be a committed doomer who will never be dissuaded: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a position he wasn't reasoned into" (J. Swift). I'll do you the honor of assuming you're not merely a poor reader, and your misquote was deliberate.
But for the lurkers: I didn't say "replacing fossil fuels in a decade". What I said was "literally no one expects decarbonization to be complete for *at least* a decade." (emphasis hopefully superfluous). IOW, dishonest rhetorical tactics expose Kollapstankar's obstructionist intent.
Again: Kollapstankar blatantly ignores the time dimension, and the uncertainties it introduces, especially those 8 billion random agents loose in the global marketplace, more or less motivated to intervene collectively. I, OTOH, need only project, within multiple sources of uncertainty, the curve of global heat content during my remaining "natural" (gotta love Medicare) life!
A lot can happen in 25 years. Only that long ago, I feared (ask me why) there were no alternatives to open-ended global warming, given the independent agency of (then) 6.1 billion other people. But yesterday, despite another 2 billion people living, a headline appeared on Science.org: "Global greenhouse emissions will soon flatten or decline—a historic moment driven by China’s surge in renewable energy" (https://www.science.org/content/article/global-carbon-emissions-will-soon-flatten-or-decline). I judge I can reasonably anticipate seeing the slope of the Keeling curve begin to flatten, and maybe even decline if emissions fall below the rate of natural CO2 drawdown in that time. YMMV!
Yes, people are already dying sooner than they would without anthropogenic climate change, and the attributable death toll will surely rise before the trend of GMST is capped. How much, how fast, is as yet undetermined! I'm not dead yet, nor are you AFAICT, Kollastankar. Go peddle your nihilism somewhere else, please.
This is a fascinating article. As an industry economist (public transit) I found the energy premise elegant. You provide a basis for analyzing social benefits and costs across energy sources. Mitigating or reversing the negative impacts of single-use products can also be expressed as energy.
Thanks Andrew for sharing my work on “billion dollar disasters” and why that tabulation cannot be used for research that means anything, which is of course why I don’t use that dataset in my work to say anything about the real world. There are better data out there.
Here is a direct link to my critique of the “billion dollar disasters”:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44304-024-00011-0
Congrats on the new book 👍
I suspect the embedded water is significant and accounts for more embedded energy, e.g., water's acquisition, treatment and disposal.
How many watt hours of energy did you use writing this article? 😄
too many